Considered a pioneer of Performance Art, Land Art and Body Art, Ana Mendieta left Cuba for exile in the US in early youth and died under tragic circumstances in 1985. Linking avant-garde forms of expression with the spiritual mysticism of SanterÌa, a syncretistic religious movement, but also with issues of gender and questions of migration, her work is relevant still today.
The exhibitionóprepared in close cooperation with RaquelÌn Mendieta, the artistís sister, and the Galerie Lelong New York, trustee of the estateófocuses on the radical performances of the early seventies, documented in photographs, slides and videos, and on the photographic work completed before 1981 centring on the ìSilueta Worksî. By inscribing body shapes into nature, respectively into landscape, Ana Mendieta creates impressive, processual images striving for a synthesis of the individual with a greater whole. At the same time, her works visualize the unmediated artistic and gestural potential of the body. The wealth of allusions and references make them works of great complexity.
The exhibition in Lucerne is the first solo museum presentation of Ana Mendieta in Switzerland. It will comprise eight galleries with two video projections, five slide series, approx. 80 photographs as well as the installation Burial of —aÒigo (1976). Among these are many hitherto unpublished works.
The accompanying catalogue, the first German monograph on Ana Mendieta contains texts by Patrick Dondelinger, specialist on religion, and Laura Roulet, the American specialist on Ana Mendieta. It presents, for the first time, an integral view of this varied and also controversial artist.